My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

The story follows an unnamed protagonist who, when his village is raided by slave traders, escapes into the “Bush of Ghosts” and spends the next few decades being chased, trapped, worshipped, and married in the various villages of ghosts he comes to. The book is full of rich descriptions and I was constantly asking myself “who would write this??” because it’s strange, even by my weird taste in media.

Tutuola only had 6 years of formal schooling, and the stylistic outcomes of that make this book simultaneously both one of the best and one of the worst things I’ve ever read. The descriptions, the weaving of Yoruba folklore, and the utter horror of it all are simply incredible. The ghost morphology was something which felt completely fresh to my western experience while the storytelling kept things moving, constantly introducing new iconic ghosts. I really love the phrase “At no point in that sentence did I know what the next word was going to be”, which is a great summation of many sentences in this book.

At the same time, however, the book read like Tutuola had only ever read the Bible with its extremely terse descriptions and loose plotting. The sentences are long, looping, and filled with details that do not fit the conception of ‘normal English’. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, many legendary authors write in their own style (supporters compared Tutuola’s style to great authors with peculiar styles like James Joyce). Call it uneducated, call it anticolonial. I usually found it engaging, but occasionally wanted to break out my red pen and add some periods. I also occasionally found myself yearning for more ‘normal’ plotting, where actions have reactions, events have consequences, and foreshadowing and callbacks weave the story into a coherent whole.

More critically, the storytelling lacks perspective. It frequently makes technological jumps that really challenge the suspension of disbelief. Ostensibly, the story takes place during the time of the Transatlantic slave trade, but yet the narrator/protagonist at one point refers to himself as a radio, and later meets a ghost with a TV for a head. The loss of perspective reminds me of stories kids would write in elementary school where they were unable to write from any perspective except their own.

That criticism aside, these ghosts will be haunting my dreams for a long while yet, so I leave you with some choice descriptions of particularly vile ghosts:

another terrible ghost whose eyes were watering all over his body and his large mouth faced back brought urine which was mized with limestone to me to drink as they were not using ordinary water there because it was too clean for them.

p. 26

Their mother had a special long and huge head which she was using to talk and to feed herself, it was above everything in the town and it showed her out from a distance of about four miles from this town. She had a large mouth which could swallow an elephant uncut. The two fearful large eyes which were on the front of her head were always flashing or bringing out fire whenever she was opening them, and this is why all the rest ghosts and ghostesses with all other creatures gave her the name of "flash-eyed mother". There were over a thousand thick teeth in this mouth, each was about two feet long and brown in colour, both upper and lower lips were unable to cover the teeth. The hair on her head was just as bush, all could weigh more than a ton if cut and put on a scale, each was thicker than a quarter of an inch and almost covered her head, except the face.

p. 99

But as the "Invisible and invincible Pawn" woke up all the dead sholdiers and replaced their heads which were cut off by the enemies to their necks and as my own was cut off as well, so he mistakenly put a ghost's head on my neck instead of mine. But as every ghost is talkative, so this head was always making various noises both day and night and also smelling badly.

p. 111